April 4, 1968

We didn’t have phones in our dorm rooms.

In my dorm, there were three phone booths per floor, and freshman had to take turns answering the phone between 7 p.m. and 9 p.m. each evening. You answered the phone, went and knocked on the callee’s door and, if they weren’t there, called downstairs to the smoker. After that, you left a note.

I wasn’t on phone duty on April 4, 1968. It was a fellow freshman who picked up the phone and went to fetch Mary B, a senior. But I was out in the corridor when Mary B. ran down the hall, crying that Martin Luther King had been killed. Mary B. scared the crap out of me. She was quite tall and plenty tough. (And, by the way, a Worcester girl.) One time, when I was the phone girl for the night, I had called down to the smoker to tell her she had a call. The smoker phone was busy, so I just left a message on her door for her.

Big mistake.

An hour or so later, she was pounding on my door, screaming at me that I should have come down the smoker to get her, and that I’d made her miss an important call about some political activity she was involved in. Of course, if  she was expecting a call that was so all-fired important, maybe she should have been waiting in her room for it, rather than hanging in the smoker chain-smoking and playing bridge. Of course, I said nothing, but after that I stayed out of her line of sight, that’s for sure. (This was pretty easy to do since, as far as I could tell, she spent most of her time in the smoker playing bridge. I maintain that I never learned to play bridge because I wasn’t a smoker.)

Anyway, Mary B. had, I believe, spent a summer registering voters in Mississippi or some other dire place, and was a major supporter of MLK. A friend called her to give her the news. Understandably, she was distraught.

We didn’t have TVs in our rooms. We had radios. There was a communal TV in the first floor lounge of the dorm.

I don’t exactly remember, but I’m guessing we all went down to watch the news about Dr. King. When I was in college, we rarely watched television. Idle time was taken up by bull sessions or jams (someone would put a Motown album on and we’d dance). The only time I remember watching television while I was college dorm-dweller had occurred a few days early – March 31st – when LBJ announced he wouldn’t be seeking another term. Having knocked on doors for Gene McCarthy, I was quite excited by this announcement.

What I don’t remember is being devastated by the death of MLK.

I was absolutely upset, but I don’t recall weeping or being crushed. It was not that I was ignorant of the Civil Rights movement. And I knew that the death of Martin Luther King was terrible. As a news junky, I was very familiar with him. I’d watched him deliver the “I Have Dream Speech” – or at least as much as they showed on Huntley & Brinkley. A few weeks later, I’d read with horror about the little black girls murdered in the Birmingham church bombing. I knew all about Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman. And Viola Liuzzo. I’d watched MLK leading the march in Selma. I knew about sit-ins, lunch counters, fire houses, police dogs. “We Shall Overcome.” CORE. SNCC. But my nascent political activism was focused on the Vietnam War.

I now know more about MLK and Civil Rights. And enough to know that, fifty years on, when a police officer shoots a black man – even if that black man is lying on the ground, hands open, pleading for his life – that shooting is more than likely to find be determined to be justified.

If Dr. King had lived, he’d be an old man of 89.

At the March for Our Lives in Washington, DC, his nine-year-old granddaughter – Yolanda Renee King – gave a brief but remarkably stirring speech. Yolanda has a dream that “enough is enough.” I’m sure the old man would be justifiably proud.

The aphorism likely originated with Unitarian abolitionist Theodore Parker, but it was Martin Luther King who made it famous, but here’s hoping that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”